Chapter 7: First Blood

The fire that now burned within Lilith was not the warm, nurturing flame of leadership, but a cold, radioactive core of pure intent. The lock of Alya’s hair and Guths’s letter were seared into her soul, a constant, agonizing fuel. She channeled all of it—the grief, the rage, the visceral horror—into the machinery of war. The Sixth Army Group, once a demoralized collection of frightened girls, was forged in the crucible of her will into something sharp, desperate, and deadly.

Their first major engagement came not at the formidable walls of Jade City itself, but at a strategic river crossing twenty miles east, designated on maps as Ford Aurek. A Loran regiment, dug into strong defensive positions on the opposite bank, guarded the only serviceable bridge for miles.

Under the leaden grey sky, Lilith observed the enemy lines through her field glasses. There was no hesitation in her, no contemplative weighing of odds. She saw only an obstacle between her and Guths.

“They are confident,” Anya murmured beside her, noting the well-prepared trenches and interlocking fields of fire.

“They are in our way,” Lilith replied, her voice flat. “Artillery. Concentrate on their forward trenches and machine-gun nests. I want a corridor cleared.”

The order was given. The Rose artillery, one of the few components of the Sixth Army that was genuinely well-equipped and competently manned, opened up with a deafening roar. The world dissolved into sound and concussion. Geysers of earth and shattered timber erupted along the Loran line. The initial bombardment was shockingly effective, suppressing the enemy fire.

“Now,” Lilith said, her gaze unwavering. “Full assault. Overwhelm them.”

What followed was not a battle of finesse, but a tidal wave of desperate fury. The young noblewomen of the Sixth, no longer seeing themselves as individuals with a future, but as extensions of their General’s vengeance, fixed bayonets and charged. Their screams were not of fear, but of a collective, pent-up agony. They wore their ridiculous sailor suits and silk bows into the mud and blood, their perfect hair matted with filth. They fought with a terrifying, unthinking ferocity, swarming the Loran positions under the covering fire of their own guns.

The Loran regiment, expecting a probing attack or a more measured assault, was caught off guard by the sheer, suicidal intensity. Their lines buckled, then broke. Within hours, the crossing was secured. Hundreds of Loran soldiers, seeing the frenzy in the eyes of their attackers, threw down their weapons and surrendered, hoping for mercy from what they still perceived as a “softer” foe.

They were herded into a muddy field near the shattered bridge, hands on their heads, faces pale with fear and defeat.

Lilith walked among them, her boots sinking into the churned earth. Her expression was not one of triumph, but of cold, surgical assessment. These men were not soldiers to her. They were extensions of the system that produced Guths. They were the audience to her sister’s humiliation. They were, in that moment, worthless.

An officer, a young captain with a bloodied bandage around his arm, stepped forward, saluting shakily. “General, we surrender. We claim the rights of prisoners of war under the—”

Lilith’s pistol was in her hand before he could finish the sentence. The shot was deafeningly loud in the sudden silence. The captain crumpled to the ground, a look of profound surprise frozen on his face.

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A wave of terror swept through the prisoners.

“There are no rights here,” Lilith announced, her voice carrying over the field without needing to shout. “There is only a debt. A debt owed in blood.”

She turned to the battalion commander of the unit that had taken the field, a stern-faced woman whose own uniform was spattered with gore. “Execute them. All of them.”

The order was met with a moment of stunned hesitation, even from her own hardened troops. This was not the convention of war.

Lilith’s icy gaze swept over her soldiers. “Do it. And when you are done, sever their heads. Gather them. They are to be a message.”

The massacre that followed was as methodical as it was brutal. Volleys of rifle fire rang out, followed by the gruesome, wet sounds of close-quarters work with bayonets and entrenching tools. When it was over, the field was a charnel house.

Lilith watched, unmoved, as her soldiers, their hands now stained a deeper crimson, piled the heads into grisly pyramids. She selected one, the face relatively intact, and had it cleaned. She then took a piece of captured Loran stationery and wrote a single line, in the common tongue of both nations:

“I am coming for what is mine.”

She placed the note in the dead soldier’s mouth and sealed the head in a sturdy wooden box. She handed it to a terrified Loran medic who had been spared for this sole purpose. “Take this to General Guths. Tell him it is a reply to his letter.”

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The box was delivered to Guths’s headquarters later that evening. He received it in his study, his expression one of mild curiosity. He opened it, the faint chemical smell from his collection room mingling with the coppery scent of blood.

He looked at the head, noting the clean shot that had likely been the cause of death. Then he saw the paper. He retrieved it with a pair of tweezers, his movements fastidious. He read the message, and a slow, genuine smile spread across his face.

“Oh, Lilith,” he whispered, a tone of genuine admiration in his voice. “You are a quick study. And you have such… passion.”

He saw not an atrocity, but a masterpiece of communication. She had understood his language—the language of possession, of objects, of symbolic gestures. Her rage was glorious, a vibrant, chaotic color he had not yet added to his palette.

He did not order a retaliatory strike. He did not rage. Instead, he spent the next few hours in a state of creative bliss. He had a high-quality photograph of Lilith, sourced from her academy files, and he had his own clandestine photographs of Alya in his collection. He sat at his desk, using his considerable skill with graphics, and created a beautiful, leather-bound folio.

On the left page, he placed Alya’s photograph, the one of her alive and smiling. Beside it, he placed a tasteful, artistically lit photograph of her preserved head in its place of honor in his cabinet. The contrast was breathtakingly cruel.

On the right page, he placed the best photograph he had of Lilith, her face set in determined, commanding lines. He left the space beside it blank.

Beneath the images, in his elegant script, he wrote a caption:

The Von Aether Sisters: A Study in Contrasts.

Alya: Perfection Captured. Serenity Eternal.

Lilith: The Final Piece. Awaiting Her Curation.

He sealed the folio in a fine portfolio case and handed it to the same aide. “Ensure the Rose lines receive this. For General Lilith’s eyes only.”

When Lilith received it, days later, as her army continued its grim march towards Jade City, she nearly broke. The sight of her sister, the before and after, presented with the aesthetic sensibility of a museum catalogue, was a psychological violation far deeper than any battlefield horror. The blank space next to her own photograph was a promise, an inevitability.

She screamed, a raw, ragged sound that tore at her throat. She threw the folio against the wall of her tent, then collapsed to her knees, sobbing in fury and despair. But when she rose again, her tears had evaporated, leaving behind something harder, more brittle, and infinitely more dangerous.

The message was received. The game was acknowledged. And Lilith von Aether, her soul now mortgaged to the devil of revenge, led her mourning army ever onward towards the gleaming, impregnable walls of Jade City, and the artist of nightmares who waited within.